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The Ethereum merge is done

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#491

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

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If you’re gonna make wild prophecies about how crypto is going to completely democratize control of the money supply - and crypto boosters love to rant about stuff like that - then yeah, people are going to keep on finding fault with it until someone comes up with a new replacement for “proof of turning a fuckton of energy into waste heat” that isn’t “proof of having a fuckton of money invested in the coin”.

The number two crypto left Proof of Waste and that’s good, yay! But the whole scene is still in the shadow of Bitcoin’s Proof of Waste, and until that does the same, or shrinks to an irreverent shitcoin, people are gonna hate on all crypto for its energy usage.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#492
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

Not so fast. In both networks, the ultimate control is held by those who run end-user nodes. These people create demand for the asset, and creating demand is ultimately the way to control the asset. An end-user node is like a device, which verifies that bank notes are genuine or that gold coins are pure. If everyone can independently reject bad money and accept good money, the good money will have more demand and the…

> These people create demand for the asset

I don't think I really understood what you meant by this... Nor did I really follow your overall point here, if I'm to be honest...

> means that the network is not properly decentralized

ummmm..... this just sounds like a convenient excuse in case of failure.

- "Somebody did a 51% attack!" - "Oh, well it's not the system's fault, it just means that the implementation was bad"

Actually 51% attacks are a theoretical feature of these systems, before you even get to the implementation details.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#493

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#494

I think this is nice, it forces people that want to participate to have skin in the game. With proof of work there is incentive for people not invested in crypto to mine as much as possible and sell everything. If a big enough computer is created, someone not interested in crypto can take money away from it, or if the computer is big enough even destroy it, a quantum computer for instance, should make a 51% attack on…

>If a big enough computer is created, someone not interested in crypto can take money away from it, or if the computer is big enough even destroy it, a quantum computer for instance, should make a 51% attack on a network as proof it is a quantum computer.

Thank you for this vision of a happier future.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#495

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

Quoted post unavailable.

I think money satisfies nocoiners already.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those could be exchanges ? Which would mean they represent very large numbers of users. Seems the most likely explanation. The idea that this isn’t true in BTC or PoW seems like a wild fiction to me.

Mining pools do this.

Not really the same. Mining pools simply point their capital at an api while those staking with exchanges literally give them their capital. With stratum V2 on the horizon (allows miners to construct their own blocks while in a pool) the similarities will be even less.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#498

I appreciate it wasting less precious energy. But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? The wealthy actors are the ones dictating the transaction now and they also on top get paid for being rich. This does not sound like a "better financial system" for me. Also, don't forget the DAO Fork[0] where with the "ungovernable Blockhain" it was decided a transaction w…

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

Not personally into crypto much, but wouldn’t proof-of-identity for those who want to vote be enough? Those who simply want to use the system (to send/receive) need not disclose themselves, but those participating in the ledger ought to have to unmask themselves so that when something goes horribly wrong there’s a person to point at/sue/whathaveyou…

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#499
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

Which is what the Worldcoin project tries to do with their retina scans. The idea isn't bad in principle. On the other hand they want the same amount of their virtual currency for themselves as 2 billion people .

Handing over a copy of my biometrics to a VC-funded-and-ran private company is about the last thing I'd want to do in my life, just below taking said eyeballs out.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#500

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

You can build the visa / Mastercard layer with “human judgement” on top.

Why bother paying more for a slow database if you’re not going to rely on the one feature which can’t be done faster, cheaper, and more reliably than the current financial system?
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